MOTHER TONGUE TEACHING AS A PRIORITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATION: THE SWEDISH EXPERIENCE FOR UKRAINE

Abstract

The article outlines the legislative and regulatory framework for ensuring mother tongue teaching in the context of Ukrainian realities, identifies valuable educational practices of mother tongue teaching in Sweden, and on this basis identifies possible recommendations taking into account Ukrainian realities at the legislative, regulatory, organizational, and pedagogical levels. By using a range of research methods, the article presents important aspects of the problem of mother tongue teaching in Ukraine: the content analysis method allowed to determine the priorities of mother tongue and multilingual education based on the study of legislative resources, documents issued by UNESCO, the Council of Europe, etc.; through theoretical analysis clarified the essence of the concepts of «mother tongue education» and «mother tongue teaching»; application of the scientific extrapolation method enabled to identify opportunities for mother tongue teaching in Ukraine based on the experience of Sweden. The following educational practices of mother tongue teaching based on the experience of Sweden can be valuable for Ukraine: recognizing a single state language at the state level; ensuring conditions for the development of multilingualism; conducting regular monitoring studies on the problems of mother tongue teaching and studying support for multilingualism in education; need to improve the quality of bilingual teacher training based on in-depth mastery of the resource wealth of the mother tongue and languages of national minorities; development of informal mother tongue education for children and adults.
 Keywords: mother tongue teaching; mother tongue education; multilingual education; Sweden, Ukraine; bilingual teachers; language policy.